[geerlingguy]

I've made a similar observation to the original post — in my case, moving a bit of functionality from PHP to Node.js gave me 100x better performance: https://servercheck.in/blog/moving-functionality-nodejs-incr...

But the reason for this wasn't that Node/JS is faster than PHP; it was because I was able to write the Node.js app asynchronously, but the PHP version was making hundreds of synchronous requests (this is the gist of the OP).

The issue I have is that Node.js makes asynchronous http calls relatively easy, whereas in PHP, using curl_multi_exec is kludgy, and few libraries support asynchronous requests.

The situation is changing, but the fact remains that asynchronous code is the norm in Node.js, while blocking code is the norm in PHP. This makes it more difficult (as of this writing) to do any non-trivial asynchronous work in PHP.